Managing groups of computing entities such as servers in a server farm, networked computing entities at an Enterprise, collections of embedded entities such as printers, household appliances, medical equipment at a hospital and other collections of computing entities is typically done by one or more administrators in a semi-manual manner. For example, to install a new software upgrade at servers in a server farm an administrator carries out management operations on each server in turn. The administrator uses his or her expertise to carry out the upgrades and the process is time consuming and complex. Administrators are typically required to use their own expertise to manually schedule and launch management operations in an appropriate order. For example the management operations may be to apply a system update, reboot a particular entity, to load a new software component to all machines in a manufacturing process or other similar operations.
The embodiments described below are not limited to implementations which solve any or all of the disadvantages of known systems for managing groups of computing entities.